AMD's desktop Kaveri chips rumoured for February

AMD's upcoming Kaveri chips are scheduled to 'launch' in December ahead of actual availability in February, leaked slides have claimed.

AMD is claimed to be planning a 'paper launch' for its Kaveri desktop accelerated processing units (APUs) in December, ahead of channel availability of at least three models by February 2013.

The latest iteration of AMD's heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA) platform, which will include unified CPU and GPU address spaces for improved cooperation, Kaveri promises significant improvements over current-generation APUs. Based on the Steamroller microarchitecture, Kaveri chips are tipped to include graphics processing cores based on the Graphics Core Next architecture and - in selected models, at least - an integrated ARM Cortex-A5 core, which will form a security sub-system which runs separately from the main processor.

While original rumours had suggested that Kaveri would launch before the year is out, more recent claims have seen the launch pushed back to early 2014. Now, slides leaked by sources unknown to VR-Zone suggest that AMD is looking to 'launch' the chips in early December, but does not plan to have them formally available at retail until February 2014.

The roadmap slides claim that AMD is planning to announce three stock-keeping units (SKUs) at an event in early December: two flagship A10 chips, and a cost-reduced A8 likely formed from dies that didn't pass muster for A10 use. The slide suggests that engineering samples for all three SKUs have already been completed, with production-ready samples scheduled for December ahead of mass production later that month.

It's this December time-frame in which AMD is claimed to be announcing the parts in a paper launch, but there will be a considerable wait before buyers can get their hands on the chips: according to the slides, channel availability of the new APUs will begin in February 2014 to be followed by retail availability later in the year.

Kaveri will mark an important move for AMD as it seeks to capitalise on its design wins in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One next-generation consoles with powerful APU designs for mid-range gaming desktops.

Estimate is a 10% improvement in IPC, so big improvement in single thread no.

Since it isn't going to be a new process either (as far as I know), no promises of improved power consumption (maybe worse, depending on what they did to get that 10% IPC improvement) and likely no higher clock speeds.

This is moving the markers a yard, not a whole knew down.

Granted, the last couple of releases Intel hasn't done much to improve their processors CPU performance much, other then some edge cases (TSX, some new instruction sets)...but I will grant that Intel has increased GPU performance on chip from Sandy to Haswell of roughly 200-500% depending on which version of the graphics you are comparing.

AMD in the same time period I think has increased graphical performance something like 30-50%. Sure, AMD had been way ahead to start with...but there are a large number of Intel GPU solutions that are FASTER than AMD in the same power envelope. About the only area AMD is still generally pretty far ahead is most desktop graphics (and then only if you are comparing against the "common" HD4600 in most socketed Intel solutions). Mobile, Intel seems to generally be ahead by a little to a lot in the same thermal envelope.

Things do not look good for AMD.

I do hope Intel improves on the CPU side of things a fair amount with Broadwell, even if it is ONLY higher turbocore speeds and base clocks and not much IPC improvements. With a supposed 30+% improvement in power consumption, they could use a bit more dynamic setup. It'd be a shame if they funneled all of that in to a lower TDP and nothing in to increased performance (Crap, Haswell laptops, if done right, can already get 8-10hrs of battery life, which should be good enough for most everyone. Instead of a lower TDP, how about improved graphics and maybe tweak the base and turbocore speeds 100/300Mhz respectively?)

Wikipedia says that steamroller min process size is 28nm. I've never seen a cpu manufactured on a half node, but it looks like that may be the route AMD takes from now on with Excavator supposidly a half node 20nm part too?